Receiving a receipt as evidence of a sale of goods or provision of services is a ubiquitous part of our life. When you go to a grocery store and make a purchase of one or more items, you receive a receipt. When you purchase fuel for your car, you receive a receipt. Indeed, receipts permeate all aspects of transactions. Generally speaking, receipts evidence a record of a transaction. Receipts itemize the goods or services that were purchased, particularly itemizing what (goods and/or services) was purchased, the quantity of any given item that was purchased, the price of the items) purchased, taxes, special offers and/or discounts generally applied or for particular items, the date (and often the time) of the transaction, the location of the transaction, vendor information, sub-totals and totals, and the like.
There is no set form for receipts. Receipts may be printed on full sheets of paper, though many point of sale machines print receipts on relatively narrow slips of paper of varying lengths based, frequently, on the number of items (goods or services) that were purchased. While receipts itemize the items that were purchased, the itemizations are typically terse, cryptic and abbreviated. One reason for this is the limited amount of space that is available for descriptive content. Further, each vendor typically controls the descriptive “language” for any given item. Even different stores of the same vendor will utilize distinct descriptive language from that of other stores. As a consequence, while the purchaser will typically be able to decipher the itemized list of purchased items based on knowledge of what was purchased, a third party will not: the itemized list of purchased items does not lend itself to fully describing the purchases.